2010/02/03

We’re in the process of releasing an update to Spotify, version 0.3.23. We’ve made some minor bug fixes and added password protection to download purchases which you can modify in the preferences menu.

The other main change with this release is the addition of a ‘Related artists’ tab to the artist view.

This feature is pretty exciting for us as it’s the first time we’ve used our own data to power recommendations. Previously we’ve used genre and artist tagging from AllMusic for related artists which worked well, but did not cover a large portion of our catalogue. What we’ve done now is to go through months and months of listening data and look closely at what people listen to.

This allows us to see that users who listen to a lot of The Rolling Stones, for example, are also big fans of Iggy Pop or The Byrds. The new feature pulls some of this information together to show you a range of related artists in one tab.

The ‘Related artist’ tab is the first of many uses for this data and we hope you’ll be able to find some great new bands you might not have otherwise heard of.